Life Will Be the Death of Me Read online

  “I’m a big proponent of being responsible for your own happiness,” I continued, “and have always had a surfeit of dopamine to go along with it, so the only thing I really want to work on is my temper and impulse control…or, at the very least, behavior modification. I’m basically looking for a behaviorist. Like, for a puppy. I’d like to learn how to make my point without yelling.”

  Our first few sessions consisted of Dan guiding me through meditation, after which I would spend the rest of the time bitching about Donald Trump and what a piece of shit he was. I was paying someone hundreds of dollars an hour to complain about Donald Trump, which seemed like the exact right move. I would have paid him double. I had definitely paid for far worse in my life. I knew people were getting sick and tired of my anger directed toward the 2016 election and the daily horrifying cabinet appointees, and Ivanka and that schmuck Jared, and that evil witch they called a press secretary. I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that Sarah Suckabee Sanders and Ivanka Trump had no morality or sense of obligation to the very sex they inhabited—to stand up and say, No more. I needed someone to let me vent, privately. I needed someone to help me harness my anger into something positive.

  In our third session, Dan asked me about my childhood.

  “Just the usual bullshit: my parents were kind of lame, I have five brothers and sisters, one of whom died when he was twenty-two, and my mom died a few years ago—I don’t really have any sense of time, so it could have been ten years ago…or five years, I really don’t know, but I’d rather talk about right now. What can I do right now?”

  He looked at me with something in his eyes that I had seen before from doctors when I mentioned that my brother had died, and that slightly annoyed me because I was paying him to talk about what I wanted to talk about, which was the present—not the past. It felt like pity, and that wasn’t something I was interested in being on the receiving end of.

  Of course I wanted to talk about my brother, but I wasn’t about to admit that to a stranger.

  Now, I know that I was testing him. He was earning my trust. I had to make sure I respected him, and I had to make sure he wasn’t going to let me steamroll him. All I knew at the time was that I felt a responsibility, to myself and to my friends and to all the other people I loved, to keep going to my appointments with him. I didn’t always feel like going—the same way I felt about meditating—but I felt that it was my duty to start doing more things that I didn’t feel like doing. Something was pulling me toward him—it was as if my biological clock were telling me that I needed a psychiatrist before I wouldn’t be able to reproduce anymore.

  It was during our fifth or sixth session that he asked me if I had ever heard of something called the Enneagram. I hadn’t. I asked him if it was a heart monitor. It’s not.

  The Enneagram is a psychological system based on certain ancient approaches to viewing our lives. More recently, the philosophy was adapted and popularized in the United States by a number of people as a personality test and tool for self-discovery. Dan, my therapist, and other physicians and researchers have been using variations of the Enneagram to explore the idea that there is a scientifically recognized brain-based personality pattern that develops and manifests over the course of our lives. Dan applies something called a PDP model, which stands for patterns of developmental pathways. Basically, this method suggests that most people are born with a tendency toward one of three default zones based on how you contend with the separation that occurs when you leave the womb, where you are safe and warm and nourished for nine months, and are then catapulted into a hospital room with harsh fluorescent lights shining on you (if you’re lucky), where you are greeted with a smack on the ass and you have to cry every time you want to eat or are in pain, because suddenly that’s the only way to communicate your needs. Or something like that. Anyway, Dan says how you navigate this transition from the inner peace of the womb to the struggles of the world outside of it is an important factor in determining your personality.

  I gave him a skeptical look. When he asked me what I was thinking, I told him that this sounded very LA.

  “What do you mean?” he asked earnestly.

  “You know…I mean, are people really holding on to their births all these years later? I just find that a little hard to believe. Now people are going to be pissed about being born? It’s a little much, no?”

  He cocked his head to the side, and I didn’t know if it was meant to challenge me, or if he was sincerely confused by my Los Angeles reference.

  “I just have a hard time comprehending why rehashing the past repeatedly, time and time again, is beneficial to people who just need to get up and move the fuck on. Get over it. There are people being blown out of their homes in Syria. We have a president who is rolling back women’s rights, and innocent black men are getting shot and killed by police officers every day. Get out of your own asshole, and look around.”

  The irony that I was sitting in a psychiatrist’s office complaining about people who sit in a psychiatrist’s office was not lost on either of us. We locked eyes with an intense stare because what I had admitted was more profound than anything I was blabbering on about; I had sought out the help of a professional because I knew, on a cellular level, that I wouldn’t be able to help anyone in a real, meaningful way until I was able to sit with myself—a place I believed I was too smart to ever have to go to.

  “Okay, that’s fair,” he said, nodding, understanding where I was coming from. “Just so you know, from my professional experience, I have seen how it has helped a lot of people to understand themselves and the people they love in a deeper way. But we don’t have to talk about it. It’s totally up to you.”

  I told him what my father told me about taking one piece of information away from any conversation and that one of my desires was to become more open-minded, as long as I was learning something, and if this was something he believed in, I was willing to hear him out.

  “Your father sounds like a smart guy,” Dan said.

  “Well, let’s not get carried away. I mean, he was and is smart, but he’s also a con man who cheated, lied, and probably stole from people. He is the epitome of a used-car dealer.”

  “In what way?”

  “He actually was a used-car dealer.”

  “Ah, okay.”

  “But please go on, because I’m here to become less judgmental, and more patient, and if I really lose interest in this subject matter, I’ll start rolling my eyes, which is also something I’d like to do less frequently.”

  He went on to tell me that this default zone is the place you revert to when you feel uncomfortable, or nervous, or when things don’t turn out the way they were supposed to. When you are born into this world, you experience one of the three reactions, which sets up your disposition in life. In the Enneagram model, the reactions are located in the head, heart, and gut. Dan and his fellow researchers developed their own model, translating those three areas of the body to emotional states: fear (head), sadness (heart), and anger (gut).

  “I’m anger.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m fucking angry. I just don’t understand how this man could get elected.”

  Dan told me to just sit with that feeling and not talk.

  What I grew to learn was that Dan didn’t want me to talk around my anger and pretend it was all about Donald Trump. What Donald Trump represented to me were things being out of control, and when things became unhinged, I became angry because that was my default zone. I realize that many people may think of me as someone who is completely out of control myself, and they’re not wrong. I am out of control, but within boundaries that no one knows about except me. I thrive in organized chaos. It keeps my juices flowing and it keeps me paying attention and on my tippy-toes.

  Once the silence had gone on for what seemed to me like an unreasonable amount of time (less than a minute), I